Ideas aren't getting harder to find (2022)

I’ve worked with a lot of research assistants over the years, and at some point we inevitably have The Talk: should they get a PhD? I was recently having The Talk with one particularly distraught student, who was worried her ideas aren’t good enough. “Maybe I’m not cut out for it,” she told me, “or maybe all of the easy ideas have already been done.” Like her, I’ve worried that I was born too late...